DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

Designers Coping with Culture in an Educational Setting
al., 2005). From other design projects we know that students need to carefully select and
design their research topics, materials and sessions. And that they need to select
participants carefully and adjust their attitude as a facilitator, especially when the
participants are more familiar with hierarchy (PDI) and collectivism (IDV) than the
students are (van Boeijen and Stappers 2010). Before students start an international
workshop they could put extra effort in advance by explicitly discuss and record their
frame of reference of the intended users or similar people in their home nation and bring
that as input for a discussion in their team.
Design
Figure 3 DESIGN: teamwork leads to global designs (left), educational differences
(middle), some quotes (right)
The non Hong Kong students encounter difficulties to judge the importance of the
meaning that specific designs, or interactions with the designs, elicit. For instance,
according to a Hong Kong student, in a design project for elder people in Hong Kong, non
Hong Kong students find it difficult to understand that serving many dishes to guests
communicates and means that they are welcome to pick food. Carrying dishes one by
one is valued as ‘good’ instead of creating efficient solutions to carry all bowls at a time.
When discussing how universal or cultural specific their designs are students state that
the designs mostly have their origin from a local need, such as limited space, but they
often think that the result is a more global one, which means that the designs not typically
refer to a specific culture. Although, in several projects for colours, patterns and symbols
such as a logo the students try to refer to a local culture. Some non Hong Kong students
rely on local students, but the local students also mention difficulties to understand the
meaning of product properties such as colours, sizes, materials, patterns, materials and
textures for the intended users, because intended users such as Chinese elder people
are not familiar for them too. Next to differences in cultural backgrounds students also
mention difficulties due to differences in design education (see figure 3), such as
designing a product from inside out (inner structure) or outside in (outer form), focus on
technology or form, searching for short-term/realistic solutions or long-term/futuristic
ones, starting from abstract representations or concrete ones and designing solutions
that are rather familiar, referring to established archetypes or creating new ones that are
based on visionary beliefs.
A possible drawback is that this teamwork where designers’ background is very different
leads to compromising and thus average designs, without a culture- and context specific
meaning. Equal power in the team leads to equal arguments and because of the limited
time that they work together no in depth insights and a common vision can be developed.
These differences take time to learn to cope with in the team and therefore, there is little
room for new and advanced solutions. On the other hand we know that diversity also
stimulates creativity; insights from different cultures or disciplines lead to new
combinations (McLeod and Lobel, 1992). The opposites listed in figure 2 can also be
seen as complimentary and not as barriers.
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